Drake Hotel

The Drake Hotel is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Ritter & Shay, and built between 1928 and 1929 in Philadelphia, PA.

Drake Hotel is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The Drake Hotel is also known, or has been known as, The Drake, or The Drake Apartments.

Its precise street address is 1512 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Drake Hotel is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Philadelphia and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Drake Hotel was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on September 18^th 1978, and was also included in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places on July 6^th 1977.

The building underwent a major restoration between and 1998.

Ritter & Shay was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Murphy, Quigley Company as the Main Contractor.

The Drake Hotel can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Drake Hotel was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Drake Hotel uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features terracotta reliefs with nautical themes. The ground floor is clad in stone panels topped with a cornice. On levels 2 and 3, the facade features intricate decorative motifs in terracotta that frame the windows, along with a striking brick frieze. The terraces at the top of the tower are adorned with balustrades, brick patterns, scrolls, mascarons, and finials, and two sets of large volutes lead to a terracotta dome.